The form was long enough to have been folded over on itself four different times. As she did each month, she filled out the intimate details of her family's life: ages, address, square footage, location of absent member(s), and on and on and on. She wished the bureaucrats could remember from one month to the next what she'd put down the month before. That didn't seem to be in the cards, although, if you invented a palace for yourself so you could get a bigger coal ration, they generally did find out about that, whereupon you wished you hadn't.
"Come on," she said to the children. They got into the line appropriate to the form. It was, naturally, the longest line in the entire office: conscription had made sure of that. Up at the distant front, a clerk standing behind a tall marble counter like that of a bank examined each form in turn. When satisfied, he plied a rubber stamp with might and main: thock! thock! thock!
"Wonder what's keeping him out of the Army," the middle-aged woman in front of Sylvia muttered under her breath.
"When they start conscripting clerks, you'll know the war is as good as lost," Sylvia said with great conviction. The woman in front of her nodded, the ragged silk flowers on her battered old picture hat waving up and down.
The line inched forward. Sylvia supposed she should have been grateful the Coal Board offices stayed open all day Saturday. Without that, she would have had to leave work at the fish-canning plant in the middle of some weekday, which would not have made her bosses happy about her. Of course, she would have been far from the only one with such a need, so what could they have done? Without coal, how were you supposed to cook and to heat your house or flat?
When she was three people away from pushing her form over the high counter to the clerk behind it, paying her money, and collecting the ration tickets she'd need for the month ahead, the woman whose turn it was got into a disagreement with the clerk. "That's not right!" she shouted in an Italian accent. "You think you can cheat me on account of I don't know much English? I tell you this-" Whatever this was, it was in Italian, and Italian so electrifying that a couple of women who not only heard but also understood it crossed themselves.
It rolled off the clerk like seawater down an oilcloth. "I'm sorry, Mrs., uh, Vegetti, but I have applied the policy pertaining to unrelated boarders correctly, as warranted by the facts stated on your form there," he said.
"Lousy thief! Stinking liar!" The rest was more Italian, even more incandescent than what had gone before. People from all over the Coal Board offices were staring at anyone bold enough to vent her feelings in that way before the representative of such a powerful organ of government.
The clerk listened to the stream of abuse for perhaps a minute. So, wide-eyed, did George, Jr. "What's she saying, Mama?" he asked. "She sure sounds mad, whatever it is."
"I don't understand the words myself," Sylvia answered, relieved at being able to tell the literal truth.
Clang! Clang! The clerk had heard enough. When he rang the bell, a couple of policemen came up to the irate Italian woman. One of them put a hand on her shoulder. Wham! She hauled off and hit him with her handbag. The two cops grabbed her and hustled her out of the office. She screeched every inch of the way. "Shut up, you noisy hag!" one of the policemen shouted at her. "No coal for you this month!"
A sigh ran through the big room. The woman in front of Sylvia said, "It would almost be worth it to have the chance to tell the no-good rubber stampers what you really think of them."
"Almost," Sylvia agreed wistfully. But that was the operative word. The Italian woman was going to lose a month's fuel for the sake of a few minutes' pleasure. Like a foolish woman who fell into immorality, she wasn't thinking far enough ahead.
Sylvia smiled. There were temptations, and then there were temptations…
At last, she reached the head of the line. The clerk took her form, studied it with methodical care, and spoke in a rapid drone: "Do you swear that the information contained herein is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, knowing false statements are liable to the penalty for perjury?"
"I do," Sylvia said, just as she had when the preacher asked her if she took George as her lawful wedded husband.
Thock! Thock! Thock! The rubber stamp did its work, a consummation less enjoyable than the one that had followed the earlier I do. But then George had heated her only through the wedding night. The Coal Board clerk would let her keep herself and her children warm all month long.
She passed money over the counter, receiving in return a strip of ration tickets, each good for twenty pounds of coal. The clerk said, "Be ready for a ration decrease or a price increase, or maybe both, next month."
Nodding, she took George, Jr., and Mary Jane by the hand and headed out of the office. Be ready, the clerk had said. He made it sound easy. But where was the extra money supposed to come from? What was she supposed to do if they didn't-couldn't-give her enough coal for both cooking and heating?
The clerk didn't care. It wasn't his problem. "Come on," she told her children. Like all the others the war caused, the problem was hers. One way or another, she would have to deal with it.
Outside the farmhouse, the wind howled like a wild thing. Here on the Manitoban prairie, it had a long running start. Arthur McGregor was glad he wouldn't have to go out in it any time soon. He had plenty of food; the locusts in green-gray hadn't been so thorough in their plundering as they had the winter before.
He even had plenty of kerosene for his lamps. Henry Gibbon, the storekeeper over in Rosenfeld, had discovered a surefire way to cheat the Yankees' rationing system. McGregor didn't know what it was, but he was willing to take advantage of it. Cheating the Americans was almost like soldiers making a successful raid on their lines, up farther north.
As if picking that thought right out of his head, his son Alexander said, "The Yanks still don't have Winnipeg, Pa." At fifteen, Alexander looked old enough to be conscripted. He was leaner than his father, and fairer, too, with brown hair that partly recalled his mother Maude's auburn curls. Arthur McGregor might have been taken for a black Irishman had his craggy features not been so emphatically Scots.
"Not after a year and a half of trying," he agreed now. "The troops from the mother country helped us hold 'em back. And as long as we have Winnipeg-"
"We have Canada," Alexander finished for him. Arthur McGregor's big head went up and down. His son was right. As long as grain could go east and manufactured goods west, the dominion was still a working concern. The USA had almost cut the prairie off from the more heavily settled eastern provinces, but hadn't quite managed it.
"The real question is," Arthur rumbled, "can we go through another year like this one and the last half of the one before?"
"Of course we can!" Alexander sounded indignant that his father should presume to doubt Canada could hold on.
Arthur McGregor studied his son with a mixture of fondness and exasperation. The lad was at an age where he was inclined to believe things would turn out as he wanted for no better reason than that he wanted them to turn out so. "The United States are a big country," he said, that being another oblique way to say he wasn't so optimistic as he had been.
"We're a big country, too-bigger than the USA," Alexander said, "and the Confederacy is on our side, and England, and France, and Russia, and Japan. We'll lick the Yanks yet, you wait and see."